DownWithTyranny!

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

Sunday, August 31, 2003

[8/31/2011] Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (continued)

>

(from My World and Welcome to It)

"We're going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pockcta-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "The Old Man'll get us through," they said to one another. "The Old Man ain't afraid of Hell!" . . .

"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. "You're tensed up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over."

Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm having my hair done," she said. "I don't need overshoes," said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. "We've been all through that," she said, getting out of the car. "You're not a young man any longer." He raced the engine a little. "Why don't you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?" Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. "Pick it up, brother!" snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.

. . . "It's the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan," said the pretty nurse. "Yes?" said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. "Who has the case?" "Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and Mr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over." A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard. "Hello, Mitty," he said. "We're having the devil's own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you'd take a look at him." "Glad to," said Mitty.

In the operating room there were whispered introductions: "Dr. Remington, Dr. Mitty. Mr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty." "I've read your book on streptothricosis," said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. "A brilliant performance, sir." "Thank you," said Walter Mitty. "Didn't know you were in the States, Mitty," grumbled Remington. "Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary." "You are very kind," said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. "The new anesthetizer is giving way!" shouted an interne. "There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!" "Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. "Give me a fountain pen!" he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. "That will hold for ten minutes," he said. "Get on with the operation." A nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. "Coreopsis has set in," said Renshaw nervously. "If you would take over, Mitty?" Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. "If you wish," he said. They slipped a white gown on him; he adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . .

"Dr." Mitty saves the day, again!

"Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!" Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes. "Wrong lane, Mac," said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. "Gee. Yeh," muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked "Exit Only." "Leave her sit there," said the attendant. "I'll put her away." Mitty got out of the car. "Hey, better leave the key." "Oh," said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.

They're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they won't grin at me then. I'll have my right arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. "Overshoes," he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.

When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him twice, before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town -- he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb's, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. "Where's the what's-its-name?" she would ask. "Don't tell me you forgot the what's-its-name." A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.

. . . "Perhaps this will refresh your memory." The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. "Have you ever seen this before?" Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. "This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80," he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The judge rapped for order. "You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?" said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. "Objection!" shouted Mitty's attorney. "We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July." Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. "With any known make of gun," he said evenly, "I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand." Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty's arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. "You miserable cur!" . . .

"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit,'" she said to her companion. "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A. & P., not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. "I want some biscuit for small, young dogs," he said to the clerk. "Any special brand, sir?" The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. "It says 'Puppies Bark for It' on the box," said Walter Mitty.

*

His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes, Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it. She didn't like to get to the hotel first; she would want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?" Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets.

. . . "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir," said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled hair. "Get him to bed," he said wearily. "With the others. I'll fly alone." "But you can't, sir," said the sergeant anxiously. "It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman's circus is between here and Saulier." "Somebody's got to get that ammunition dump," said Mitty. "I'm going over. Spot of brandy?" He poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. "A bit of a near thing," said Captain Mitty carelessly. "The box barrage is closing in," said the sergeant. "We only live once, Sergeant," said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?" He poured another brandy and tossed it off. "I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir," said the sergeant. "Begging your pardon, sir." Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. "It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?" The pounding of the cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flamethrowers. Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming "Auprès de Ma Blonde." He turned and waved to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . . .

Something struck his shoulder. "I've been looking all over this hotel for you," said Mrs. Mitty. "Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?" "Things close in," said Walter Mitty vaguely. "What?" Mrs. Mitty said. "Did you get the what's-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What's in that box?" "Overshoes," said Mitty. "Couldn't you have put them on in the store?" "I was thinking," said Walter Mitty. "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" She looked at him. "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you home," she said.

They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said, "Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won't be a minute." She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. "To hell with the handkerchief," said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.

TOMORROW'S THURBER TONIGHT ENCORE PRESENTATION: "No Standing Room Only" (with a note on the early career of Vincent Price)

Saturday, August 30, 2003

I think I would have allowed the illicit merchandise to lapse into forfeiture if it had come from anyone except Maria and Olympy, but I couldn't let them down. I could have written them, of course, saying that I had received their joli cadeau; but it is awkward to thank someone for a bottle of liqueur if you don't know what kind of liqueur it is. Thus it was that I replied to Mr. Durning's form letter, received ten days before Christmas five years ago. [That is, "five years ago" as of the publication of the collection Thurber Country, in which this piece first appeared in book form. As noted above, the piece itself first appeared in The New Yorker in July 1949. -- Ken]

If you received one of these notifications, and I understand that hundreds, or perhaps thousands, were sent out, you were probably sensible enough to give up the struggle for your bottle by the middle of February, but I am made of a sterner curiosity. Once the game was afoot, I -- but let us begin with Mr. Durning's first letter:

TREASURY DEPARTMENT

BUREAU OF CUSTOMS

NEW YORK 4, N. Y.

IN REPLY REFER TO:

Seiz. #41802

Det. #3173-M-48

DECEMBER 14, 1948

Mr. and Mrs. James Thurber,
The New Yorker,
25 West 43rd Street,
N. Y. City 18, N. Y.

SIR AND MADAM:

There has been placed under seizure the merchandise set forth below which arrived in the mails from Mr./Mrs. Sementzoff, France; contained in a package addressed to you.

(1) bottle -- 1/5 gal. size -- Alc. Liqueur.

You are informed that any postal union (regular) mail articles or parcel post package received from abroad which is found to contain spiritous, vinous, malted, fermented, or other intoxicating liquor of any kind, is prohibited importation in the mails and is subject to seizure and forfeiture under the provisions of section 340, title 18, U.S. Code, and seciton 593(b) of Tariff Act of 1930.

If you desire to obtain possession of this liquor you must furnish to the Law Division of this office, ROOM 318 CUSTOMHOUSE, BOWLING GREEN, NEW YORK, NEW YORK, a statement setting forth the facts surrounding the importation indicating whether the same is for your personal use or for commercial purposes, that the merchandise, if released, will not be replaced in the mails, and that notification has been given to the shipper that the importation of intoxicating liquors through the mails is prohibited. Upon receipt of such statement you will be advised of the terms upon which the liquor will be released to you.

Unless the liquor in question is taken possession of by you within a reasonable time, the same will be disposed of according to law.

Respectfully,

HARRY M. DURNING,

Collector of Customs

By: J. P. SHARAGHER

Actg. Dep. Coll.

NOW, THIS DOCUMENT smelled to heaven of potential prolixity and proliferation, and my family and friends, knowing my tendency toward querulous impatience in protracted official give-and-take, wanted me to ignore it. But I thought of Olympy and Maria. The last time my wife and I saw them was in the troubled spring of 1938, when we waved good-bye to them as we drove away from the Villa Tamisier, in Juan-les-Pins. I later wrote a small memorial to Maria's cooking and character, and to the wild abandon and quiet fortitude of her husband the day he drove my Ford sedan -- and me -- into a telephone pole. We heard from them during the first year of the Occupation, in a letter addressed to me in care of the New York Herald, New York U.S.A. They were in good health but sad spirits, and somehow deeply concerned about our safety (in that most dangerous of war fronts -- Connecticut). We sent them boxes of food from time to time, and our repeated assurances that we were well and safe, but Maria was apparently not convinced. The day the American troops arrived, she wrote us, she ran out into the streets of Juan-les-Pins and demanded nouvelles de M. et Mme. Thurber from a passing column of soldiers. A captain -- who didn't know the Thurbers from Adam and Eve -- shouted back at her that we were carrying ourselves well, and Maria was at last relieved of her grand anxiety. I have often wished that I could thank that gallant officer for his quick and thoughtful good tidings about Maria's Monsieur et Madame à New York.

Yes, thinking about Maria and Olympy, I had to get that bottle. My first brave letter, together with its tangled consequences, follows, for your information and guidance:

WEST CORNWALL, CONN.

DECEMBER 17, 1948

The Law Division,
Office of the Collector,
Room 318, Customhouse,
Bowling Green,
New York, N. Y.

GENTLEMEN:

I am writing in connection with a letter of December 14th from Mr. Harry M. Durning, Collector of Customs, sent to Mr. and Mrs. James Thurber, c/o The New Yorker Magazine, 25 West 43rd Street, New York City. Mr. Durning's letter asks me to refer to "Seiz. #41802 and Det. #3173-M-48."

The bottle of alcoholic liqueur is intended as a Christmas gift to Mrs. Thurber and myself, and was shipped from France by Mr. and Mrs. Olympy Sementzoff, who worked as our gardener and cook in France some ten years ago. They are obviously not familiar with U.S. customs regulations on shipments of alcoholic beverages from abroad.

I am advising the shippers of the customs regulations that obtain in this case, and asking them to abide by these regulations in the future.

The bottle is intended for the private use of Mrs. Thurber and myself and will be used for no commercial purpose. If and when it is released to us, it will not be replaced in the mails.

I await your further instructions in this matter, and regret the inconvenience it has caused you.

Receipt is acknowledged of your letter of December 17, 1948 regarding the merchandise listed above which arrived in the mail and which has been placed under seizure for violation of the customs revenue laws.

To secure the release of this merchandise from Customs we require that there be deposited with us the sum above stated. This payment may be made by certified check or postal money order payable to the Collector of Customs. You are also advised that in addition to our terms of release which include the payment of the above listed sum, before the merchandise finally may be released, it will be necessary for you to present to this office a state permit therefor from the Connecticut State Liquor Authority at Hartford. Upon receipt of the permit and the payment above listed, the liqueur will be forwarded to you by express, charges collect.

We request that you act promptly in this matter to secure the release of this merchandise; otherwise, it will be disposed of as provided by law.

In reference to GM/22 and Seizure #41802, and your letter of December 30, 1948, in reply to my own letter of December 17, I am this day writing for a permit from the Connecticut State Liquor Authority, which I will forward promptly when received, together with a postal money order for $3.56.

Sincerely yours,

JAMES THURBER

WEST CORNWALL, CONN.

JANUARY 5, 1949

Connecticut Liquor Authority
Hartford, Connecticut

GENTLEMEN:

I have been advised in a letter just received from Mr. Harry M. Durning, Collector of Customs in New York, that I must subit to him a Connecticut permit in order to obtain the release of a 1/5 gallon of alcoholic spirits now under seizure in New York. All other requirements set forth by Mr. Durning have been satisfied by me. The bottle under seizure will be forwarded to me by express on submission of the proper permit from your authority.

Thanking you for your prompt consideration in this matter, and with best season's wishes, I am

Sincerely yours,

JAMES THURBER

LIQUOR CONTROL COMMISSION

STATE OF CONNECTICUT

HARTFORD

JANUARY 10, 1949

James Thurber
West Cornwall, Connecticut

DEAR SIR:

Receipt is acknowledged of your communication of January 5, 1949 with reference to alcoholic liquor for your personal consumption which you desire to import into the State.

With reference to this situation, you are advised that it is necessary to apply for and receive a permit for the importation of this type of merchandise. We are enclosing, herewith, blank forms of application, no one of which may be for more than five gallons.

Before executing these applications, the State Tax Commissioner, Excise Division, State Office Building, Hartford, Connecticut should be advised as to the type of beverage to be imported; if any wine is included, the alcoholic percentage and whether "sparkling" or "still"; and they will immediately advise you as to the amount of tax due. The applications should then be executed and forwarded to the Tax Department with a check in the amount of the taxes and, when received, that department will then forward them to us with the certification that the taxes have been paid and we will, in turn, issue an import Certificate to you which must be forwarded by you to whatever transportation company is to transport the merchandise into Connecticut. This Import Certificate must accompany the merchandise in transit and must be delivered to the importer at the time of the delivery of the merchandise. Upon receipt of the alcoholic beverages, the Import Certificate must of necessity be returned to this department.

If there is any further information which you desire on the subject, we shall be very glad to advise you upon request.

On December 30, 1948, I was advised by the New York Customs authorities that they are holding one bottle 1/5 gallon alcoholic liqueur, shipped to me, in ignorance of our laws, by M. and Mme. Olympy Sementzoff from France. I was instructed to notify the Connecticut Liquor Authority, which informed me, in enclosing applications for release, that I should describe, as hereinabove, the nature and contents of the bottle in question. I have set down all that I know about it. The New York Customs demands $3.56 as their fee for release. I await your advice as to the proper tax due in this state, in full and helpless confidence that the aforementioned Christmas present will be disposed of as contraband before a man of my age can possibly satisfy all the documentary requirements. Nevertheless, I am going to try to get it.

M. Sementzoff is a White Russian, and I trust that the purity of his loyalty to France need not be established by the F.B.I. or any other organization.

Respectfully yours,

JAMES THURBER

STATE OF CONNECTICUT

TAX DEPARTMENT

470 CAPITOL AVENUE

HARTFORD 15, CONNECTICUT

IN REPLY REFER TO:

Beverage Tax Section

FEBRUARY 8, 1949

Mr. James Thurber,
West Conrwall,
Connecticut.

DEAR SIR:

Receipt is acknowledged of your letter of the 4th received in this office this morning.

We wish to advise that Connecticut state tax on 1/5 gallon of liqueur is $0.20.

If you will forward your remittance in the amount of $0.20 to cover the tax due on the liqueur that is being held by the New York Customs for you, together with the completed applications sent you by the Liquor Control Commission, we will certify payment of the tax to the Liquor Commission who will then forward you a release.

In connection with your letter of February 8th sent by Mr. Goodrich, I am enclosing a check for twenty cents ($.20), together with the necessary applications, in accordance with your instructions as to the procedure for gaining the release of the bottle of liqueur now being held by the New York Customs authorities.

I am enclosing an American air-mail stamp in order that the release from the Connecticut State Liquor Control Commission may be expedited and I am taking the liberty of requesting your kindness in sending this stamp along to them, so that the release may be sent air mail to me, c/o The British Colonial, Nassau, the Bahamas. A letter sent by ordinary mail might take weeks in getting here and I am unfamiliar with the period of time regarded as reasonable by the New York Customs officials.

Thanking you for your help in this matter,

Sincerely yours,

JAMES THURBER

LIQUOR CONTROL COMMISSION

STATE OF CONNECTICUT

HARTFORD

FEBRUARY 24, 1949

James G. Thurber,
R.F.D.,
West Cornwall, Conn.

DEAR SIR:

Enclosed herewith is Import Certificate #1627 authorizing the importation into the State of Connecticut, for your personal consumption, of LIQUEUR.

The Import Certificate must accompany the merchandise in transit and be delivered to you with the merchandise.

Upon receipt of the merchandise, the Import Certificate enclosed must be returned by you to this department.

With reference to GM/22 and Seizure #41802, and to your letters of December 14 and December 30, 1948, I am, pursuant to your direction, enclosing my check for $3.56, together with the Import Certificate just issued to me by the Liquor Control Commission of the State of Connecticut.

The Commission has advised me that the Import Certificate must accompany the shipment of the merchandise so that I may return the Certificate to the Commission when I receive it. It is my desire to conform, in full, with all the requirements of your office and those of the Connecticut authorities concerned.

There has been some unavoidable delay in gathering together all the necessary releases and certificates, but I trust I have not exceeded the time limit place upon the holding of the merchandise. In the past two and a half months I have developed a profound curiosity as to the actual contents of the merchandise.

I understand from a recent newspaper article that your office has been overburdened by the receipt of illegal shipments of alcoholic spirits from friends of Americans in France and other countries who are unaware that their expressions of good feeling are contrary to statutes of the United States. I regret that I have innocently added to your work and to your problems, and I assure you that I have made every effort to prevent the recurrence of this situation.

Sincerely yours,

JAMES THURBER

P.S. I understand that the merchandise is to be shipped to me at West Cornwall, Conn., but it has occurred to me that it may be receivable only by myself or Mrs. Thurber personally. If this is the case, I will not be in West Cornwall until March 8th. There is, however, always someone at my home to receive the shipment.

I wrote you on March 3rd, air mail from Nassau, the Bahamas, enclosing my personal check for $3.56, in final satisfaction of the stipulations of your own office and of the various Connecticut State authorities involved by law in the transaction regarding the shipment to Mrs. Thurber and myself of a Christmas gift from M. And Mme. Olympy Sementzoff in France. I am not yet in receipt of the 1/5 gallon of alcoholic liqueur that is being held under seizure by your office, unless the act of forfeiture has already been consummated.

In the fear that the shipment may have been delayed because of some fault or failure of my own, I have gone back over the voluminous correspondence in this matter, searching for possible error on my part, and I have discovered that you asked for a certified check or postal money order and that I had said I would send the tax in the form of the money order. Circumstances operated to place difficulties in my way, since I was in Nassau, where American money orders are unavailable and the certification of checks was not easy to arrange.

If the merchandise has not yet been forfeited I shall be glad to substitute a certified check in the amount of $3.56 for the check I sent you on March 3rd.

When and if the bottle is received by me, I want to write the shippers to thank them again for the gift, and I should like to be able to state the precise brand or type of liqueur. Otherwise they might suspect that I had never actually received the present, and this would add further distress to their present embarrassment, which results from their knowledge that their Christmas gift was shipped in contravention, however innocent, of our statutes and regulations.

The Connecticut State Liquor Control Commission has instructed me to return the Import Certificate when I receive the shipment. If the merchandise has, in fact, been forfeited I do not know how to comply with this particular instruction.

My curiosity as to the actual contents of the bottle has not abated, and I would greatly appreciate it if, no matter how this transaction eventuates, you would identify the liqueur for me.

I fully appreciate the problems you have to deal with in the case of the thousands of such shipments mentioned in the newspaper article I read on the subject. This one bottle has very nearly driven me crazy.

In reference to my letter of yesterday, April 5, I regret to say that it was written and mailed during the absence of Mrs. Thurber, who, upon her return, explained that you had accepted and put through my check of March 3rd in the amount of $3.56, and that the cancelled check had arrived in my bank statement on April 2nd. She further pointed out that the delay in shipment of the bottle of liqueur is no doubt due to the railway-express strike, which still obtains at this writing.

Please ignore my letter of yesterday and accept my apologies for adding to the confusion and to the considerable dossier in this matter which I have been at fault in amplifying.

Respectfully yours,

JAMES THURBER

P.S.: If the Christmas gift does not arrive before Easter, I will be in Bermuda, but the shipment will be received by my caretaker, Mr. Ben Tuller, who has instructions to forward the Import Certificate to the Connecticut Liquor Authority on my behalf.

TREASURY DEPARTMENT

BUREAU OF CUSTOMS

NEW YORK 4, N. Y.

IN REPLY REFER TO:

GM:z/22

Seizure No. 41802

APRIL 12, 1949

Mr. James Thurber
West Cornwall
Connecticut

SIR:

Reference is made to previous correspondence with this office relative to a shipment of alcoholic beverage consigned to you through the international mails in violation of the United States Code, title 18, sections 1716 and 545, covered by the above seizure number.

This office is in receipt of your remittance in accordance with the terms imposed for the release of this merchandise to you. However, the present express embargo will undoubtedly result in a delay in the receipt of the shipment by you.

Respectfully,

HARRY M. DURNING, COLLECTOR

By: ALFRED H. GOLDEN

Assistant Solicitor

On April 22nd, six days after I had sailed for Bermuda, and one hundred and twenty-nine days after the original form letter from Mr. Durning, the merchandise arrived at West Cornwall, Connecticut, intact, according to Ben Tuller, who wrote me air mail that same day, enclosing the Import Certificate, which, it turned out, had to be signed by me. There were express charges of ninety-five cents on the merchandise, which Tuller paid. He was afraid that I might not return the Import Certificate to Hartford within the period of five days afer the acceptance of the shipment, as prescribed by statute. I think I managed it, in spite of the unfortunate fact that his letter was first delivered, by mistake, to Waterlot, in Southampton Parish, instead of to Waterville, in Page East, where I was staying. The Import Certificate, because of the gravity of its warning and the nobility of its language, deserves to be read into this record, and it follows in full, or almost in full:

This certifies that James G. Thurber of R.F.D., West Cornwall, Conn., having paid the tax prescribed by SUB-SECTION (b) of SECTION 986e, 1939 SUPPLEMENT TO THE GENERAL STATUTES, AS AMENDED, is authorized to import into the STATE OF CONNECTICUT 1/5 Gal. LIQUEUR from Mr. and Mrs. Olympy Sementzoff, Juan-les-Pins, France, for his own use and consumption and not for resale. This certificate must be returned to Liquor Control Commission by person to whom issued within five (5) days after receipt of contents represented.

I WILL spare you my two letters, in French, to Maria and Olympy, the first thanking them for a gift I had not yet received and cautioning them not to do it again, the second announcing that the joli cadeau de Noël had arrived at my home five days after Pâques. I explained that I would be en séjour à Bermuda until late in June, but that I would drink to their health and happiness on the Fourth of July.

Maria and Olympy will understand. After all, the French are by no means inexperienced in the long and labyrinthine processes of officialdom, complete wiht symbols, seals, signatures, and the satisfaction of statutes and stipulations.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot. It was a bottle of Cointreau.

(Consignee's Note: Shortly after the preceding correspondence appeared in The New Yorker, I received a nice letter from Mr. Durning, enclosing an official check for two dollars. It seems that, somewhere along the line, I was inadvertently overcharged that amount.)

Friday, August 29, 2003

Olympy Sementzoff called me "Monsieur" because I was the master of the Villa Tamisier and he was the gardener, the Russian husband of the French caretaker, Maria. I called him "Monsieur" too, because I could never learn to call any man Olympy and because there was a wistful air of ancien régime about him. He drank Bénédictine with me and smoked my cigarettes; he also, as you will see, drove my car. We conversed in French, a language alien to both of us, but more alien to me than to him. He said "gauche" for both "right" and "left" when he was upset, but when I was upset I was capable of flights that put the French people on their guard, wide-eyed and wary. Once, for instance, when I cut my wrist on a piece of glass I ran into the lobby of a hotel shouting in French, "I am sick with a knife!" Olympy would have known what to say (except that it would have been his left wrist in any case) but he wouldn't have shouted: his words ran softly together and sounded something like the burbling of water over stones. Often I did not know what he was talking about; rarely did he know what I was talking about. There was a misty, faraway quality about this relationship, in French, of Russia and Ohio. The fact that the accident Olympy and I were involved in fell short of catastrophe was, in view of everything, something of a miracle.

Olympy and Maria "came with" the villa my wife and I rented on Cap d'Antibes. Maria was a deep-bosomed, large-waisted woman, as persistently pleasant as Riviera weather in a good season; no mistral ever blew in the even climate of her temperament. She must have been more than forty-five but she was as strong as a root; once when I had trouble getting a tough cork out of a wine bottle she took hold and whisked it out as if it had been a maidenhair fern. On Sundays her son came over from the barracks in Antibes and we all had a glass of white Bordeaux together, sometimes the Sementzoffs' wine, sometimes our own. Her son was eighteen and a member of the Sixth Regiment of Chasseurs d'Alpins, a tall, somber boy, handsome in his uniform and cape. He was an enfant du premier lit, as the French say. Maria made her first bed with a sergeant of the army who was cordonnier for his regiment during the war and seemed somehow to have laid by quite a little money. After the war the sergeant-shoemaker resigned from the army, put his money in investments of some profoundly mysterious nature in Indo-China, and lost it all. "Il est mort," Maria told us, "de chagrin." Grief over his ill-fortune brought on a decline; the chagrin, Maria said, finally reached his brain, and he died at the age of thirty-eight. Maria had to sell their house to pay the taxes, and go to work.

Olympy Sementzoff, Maria's second husband, was shy, not very tall, and wore a beard; in his working clothes you didn't notice much more than that. When he was dressed for Sunday -- he wore a fine double-breasted jacket -- you observed that his mouth was sensitive, his eyes attractively sad, and that he wore his shyness with a certain air. He worked in a boat factory over near Cannes -- Maria said that he was a spécialiste de bateaux; odd jobs about the villa grounds he did on his off days. It was scarcely light when he got up in the morning, for he had to be at work at seven; it was almost dark when he got home. He was paid an incredibly small amount for what he did at the factory and a handful of sous each month for what he did about the grounds. When I gave him a hundred francs for some work he had done for me in the house -- he could repair anything from a drain to a watch -- he said, "Oh, monsieur, c'est trop!" "Mais non, monsieur," said I. "Ce n'est pas beaucoup." He took it finally, after an exchange of bows and compliments.

The elderly wife of the Frenchman from whom we rented the villa told us, in a dark whisper, that Olympy was a White Russian and that there was perhaps a petit mystère about him, but we figured this as her own fanciful bourgeois alarm. Maria did not make a mystery out of her husband. There was the Revolution, most of Olympy's brothers and sisters were killed -- one knew how that was -- and he escaped. He was, of course, an exile and must not go back. If she knew just who he was in Russia and what he had done, she didn't make it very clear. He was in Russia and he escaped; she had married him thirteen years before; et puis, voilà! It would have been nice to believe that there was the blood of the Czars in Olympy, but if there was anything to the ancient legend that all the stray members of the Imperial House took easily and naturally to driving a taxi, that let Olympy out. He was not a born chauffeur, as I found out the day I came back from our automobile ride on foot and -- unhappily for Maria -- alone.

Olympy Sementzoff rode to and from his work in one of those bastard agglomerations of wheels, motor and superstructure that one saw only in France. It looked at first glance like the cockpit of a cracked-up plane. Then you saw that there were two wheels in front and a single wheel in back. Except for the engine -- which Maria said was a "Morgan moteur" -- and the wheels and tires, it was handmade. Olympy's boss at the boat factory had made most of it, but Olympy himself had put on the ailes, or fenders, which were made of some kind of wood. The strange canopy that served as a top was Maria's proud handiwork; it seemed to have been made of canvas and kitchen aprons. The thing had a right-hand drive. When the conducteur was in his seat he was very low to the ground: you had to bend down to talk to him. There was a small space beside the driver in which another person could sit, or crouch. The whole affair was not much larger than an overturned cabinet victrola. It got bouncingly under way with all the racket of a dog fight and in full swing was capable of perhaps thirty miles an hour. The contraption had cost Olympy three thousand francs, or about a hundred dollars. He had driven it for three years and was hand in glove with its mysterious mechanism. The gadgets on the dash and on the floorboard, which he pulled or pushed to make the thing go, seemed to include fire tongs, spoons, and doorknobs. Maria miraculously managed to squeeze into the seat beside the driver in an emergency, but I could understand why she didn't want to drive to the Nice Carnival in the "Morgan." It was because she didn't that I suggested Olympy should take her over one day in my Ford sedan. Maria had given us to understand that her mari could drive any car -- he could be a chauffeur if he wanted to, a bon chauffeur. All I would have to do, voyez-vous, was to take Olympy for a turn around the Cap so that he could get the hang of the big car. Thus it was that one day after lunch we set off.

Half a mile out of Antibes on the shore road, I stopped the car and changed places with Olympy, letting the engine run. Leaning forward, he took a tense grip on a steering wheel much larger than he was used to and too far away from him. I could see that he was nervous. He put his foot on the clutch, tentatively, and said, "Embrayage?" He had me there. My knowledge of French automotive terms is inadequate and volatile. I was forced to say I didn't know. I couldn't remember the word for clutch in any of the three languages, French, Italian and German, in which it was given in my "Motorist's Guide" (which was back at the villa). Somehow "embrayage" didn't sound right for clutch (it is, though). I knew it wouldn't do any good for an American writer to explain in French to a Russian boat specialist the purpose that particular pedal served; furthermore, I didn't really know. I compromised by putting my left foot on the brake. "Frein," I said. "Ah," said Olympy, unhappily. This method of indicating what something might be by demonstrating what it wasn't had a disturbing effect. I shifted my foot to the accelerator -- or rather pointed my toe at it -- and suddenly the word for that, even the French for gasoline, left me. I was growing a little nervous myself. "Benzina," I said, in Italian finally. "Ah?" said Olympy. Whereas we had been one remove from reality to begin with, we were now two, or perhaps three, removes. A polyglot approach to the fine precision of a gas engine is roundabout and dangerous. We both lost a little confidence in each other. I suppose we should have given up right then, but we didn't.

Olympy decided the extra pedal was the embrayage, shifted into low from neutral, and the next thing I knew we were making a series of short forward bounds like a rabbit leaping out of a wheat field to see where he is. This form of locomotion takes a lot out of man and car. The engine complained in loud, rhythmic whines. And then Olympy somehow got his left foot on the starter and there was a familiar undertone of protest; this set his right foot to palpitating on the accelerator and the rabbit-jumps increased in scope. Abandoning my search for the word for starter, I grabbed his left knee and shouted "Ça commence!" Just what was commencing Olympy naturally couldn't figure -- probably some habitual and ominous idiosyncrasy of the machinery. He gave me a quick, pale look. I shut off the ignition, and we discussed the starter situation, breathing a little heavily. He understood what it was finally, and presently we were lurching ahead again, Olympy holding her in low gear, like a wrestler in a clinch, afraid to risk shifting into second. He tried it at last and with a jamming jolt and a roar we went into reverse: the car writhed like a tortured leopard and the engine quit.

I was puzzled and scared, and so was Olympy. Only a foolish pride in masculine fortitude kept us going. I showed him the little jog to the right you have to make to shift into second and he started the engine and we were off again, jolting and lurching. He made the shift, finally, with a noise like lightning striking a foundry -- and veered swoopingly to the right. We barely missed a series of staunch granite blocks, set in concrete, that mark ditches and soft shoulders. We whisked past a pole. The leaves of a vine hanging on a wall slapped at me through the window. My voice left me. I was fascinated and paralyzed by the swift passes disaster was making at my head. At length I was able to grope blindly toward the ignition switch, but got my wrist on the klaxon button. When I jerked my arm away, Olympy began obediently sounding the horn. We were riding on the edge of a ditch. I managed somehow to shut off the ignition and we rolled to a stop. Olympy, unused to a left-hand drive, had forgotten there was a large portion of the car to his right, with me in it. I told him, "À gauche, à gauche, toujours à gauche!" "Ah?" said Olympy, but there was no comprehension in him. I could see he didn't know we had been up against the vines of villa walls: intent on the dark problem of gearshifting, he had been oblivious of where the car and I had been. There was a glint in his eye now. He was determined to get the thing into high on his next attempt; we had come about half a mile in the lower gears.

The road curved downhill as it passed Eden Roc and it was here that an elderly English couple, unaware of the fact that hell was loose on the highway, were walking. Olympy was in second again, leaning forward like a racing bicycle rider. I shouted at him to look out, he said "Oui" -- and we grazed the old man and his wife. I glanced back in horror: they were staring at us, mouths and eyes wide, unable to move or make a sound. Olympy raced on to a new peril: a descending hairpin curve, which he negotiated in some far-fetched manner, with me hanging onto the emergency brake. The road straightened out, I let go the brake, and Olympy slammed into high with the desperate gesture of a man trying to clap his hat over a poised butterfly. We began to whiz: Olympy hadn't counted on a fast pickup. He whirled around a car in front of us with a foot to spare. "Lentement!" I shouted, and then "Gauche!" as I began to get again the whimper of poles and walls in my ears. "Ça va mieux, maintenant," said Olympy, quietly. A wild thought ran through my head that maybe this was the way they used to drive in Russia in the old days.

Ahead of us now was one of the most treacherous curves on the Cap. The road narrowed and bent, like a croquet wicket, around a high stone wall that shut off your view of what was coming. What was coming was usually on the wrong side of the road, so it wouldn't do to shout "Gauche!" now. We made the turn all right. There was a car coming, but it was well over on its own side. Olympy apparently didn't think so. He whirled the wheel to the right, didn't take up the play fast enough in whirling it back, and there was a tremendous banging crash, like a bronze monument falling. I had a glimpse of Olympy's right hand waving around like the hand of a man hunting for something under a table. I didn't know what his feet were doing. We were still moving, heavily, with a ripping noise and a loud roar. "Poussez le phare!" I shouted, which means "push the headlight!" "Ah-h-h-h," said Olympy. I shut off the ignition and pulled on the hand brake, but we had already stopped. We got out and looked at the pole we had sideswiped and at the car. The right front fender was crumpled and torn and the right back one banged up, but nothing else had been hurt. Olympy's face was so stricken when he looked at me that I felt I had to cheer him up. "Il fait beau," I announced, which is to say that the weather is fine. It was all I could think of.

I started for a garage that Olympy knew about. At the first street we came to he said "Gauche" and I turned left. "Ah, non," said Olympy. "Gauche," and he pointed the other way. "You mean droit?" I asked, just that way. "Ah!" said Olympy. "C'est bien ça!" It was as if he had thought of something he hadn't been able to remember for days. That explained a great deal.

I left Olympy and the car at the garage; he said he would walk back. One of the garage men drove me into Juan-les-Pins and I walked home from there -- and into a look of wild dismay in Maria's eyes. I hadn't thought about that: she had seen us drive away together and here I was, alone. "Où est votre mari?" I asked her, hurriedly. It was something of a failure as a reassuring beginning. I had taken the question out of her own mouth, so I answered it. "He has gone for a walk," I told her. Then I tried to say that her husband was bon, but I pronounced it beau, so that what I actually said was that her husband was handsome. She must have figured that he was not only dead but laid out. There was a mauvais quart d'heure for both of us before the drooping figure of Olympy finally appeared. He explained sadly to Maria that the mechanism of the Ford is strange and curious compared to the mechanism of the Morgan. I agreed with him. Of course, he protested, he would pay for the repairs to the car, but Maria and I both put down that suggestion. Maria's idea of my work was that I was paid by the City of New York and enjoyed a tremendous allowance. Olympy got forty francs a day at the boat factory.

That night, at dinner, Maria told us that her mari was pacing up and down in their little bedroom at the rear of the house. He was in a state. I didn't want an attack of chagrin to come on him as it had on the cordonnier and perhaps reach his brain. When Maria was ready to go we gave her a handful of cigarettes for Olympy and a glass of Bénédictine. The next day, at dawn, I heard the familiar tintamarre and hurlement and brouhaha of Olympy's wonderful contraption getting under way once more. He was off to the boat factory and his forty francs a day, his dollar and thirty cents. It would have cost him two weeks' salary to pay for the fenders, but he would have managed it somehow. When I went down to breakfast, Maria came in from the kitchen with a large volume, well fingered and full of loose pages, which she handed to me. It was called Le Musée d'Art and subtitled Galerie des Chefs-d'oeuvre et Précis de l'Histoire de l'Art au XIXe Siècle, en France et à l'Étranger (1000 gravures, 58 planches hors texte). A present to Monsieur from Olympy Sementzoff, with his compliments. The incident of the automobile was thus properly rounded off with an exchange of presents: cigarettes, Bénédictine, and Le Musée d'Art. It seemed to me the way such things should always end, but perhaps Olympy and I were ahead of our day -- or behind it.

Thursday, August 28, 2003

[8/28/2011] Thurber Tonight: An encore presentation of "The Night the Bed Fell" from "My Life and Hard Times" (continued)

>

"The Night the Bed Fell" appeared originally in The New Yorker of July 8, 1933.

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place.

It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic one night, to be away where he could think. My mother opposed the notion strongly because, she said, the old wooden bed up there was unsafe; it was wobbly and the heavy headboard would crash down on father's head in case the bed fell, and kill him. There was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter past ten he closed the attic door behind him and went up the narrow twisting stairs. We later heard ominous creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather, who usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared some days before. (On these occasions he was usually gone six or eight days and returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn't have any more chance than a fiddler's bitch.)

We had visiting us at this time a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beall, who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep. It was his feeling that if he were not awakened every hour during the night, he might die of suffocation. He had been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to ring at intervals until morning, but I persuaded him to abandon this. He slept in my room and I told him that I was such a light sleeper that if anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I would wake instantly. He tested me the first night-- which I had suspected he would -- by holding his breath after my regular breathing had convinced him I was asleep. I was not asleep, however, and called to him. This seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took the precaution of putting a glass of spirits of camphor on a little table at the head of his bed. In case I didn't arouse him until he was almost gone, he said, he would sniff the camphor, a powerful reviver. Briggs was not the only member of his family who had his crotchets. Old Aunt Melissa Beall (who could whistle like a man, with two fingers in her mouth) suffered under the premonition that she was destined to die on South High Street, because she had been born on South High Street and married on South High Street. Then there was Aunt Sarah Shoaf, who never went to bed at night without the fear that a burglar was going to get in and blow chloroform under her door through a tube. To avert this calamity -- for she was in greater dread of anesthetics than of losing her household goods -- she always piled her money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading: "This is all I have. Please take it and do not use your chloroform, as this is all I have." Aunt Gracie Shoaf also had a burglar phobia, but she met it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars had been getting into her house every night for forty years. The fact that she never missed anything was to her no proof to the contrary. She always claimed that she scared them off before they could take anything, by throwing shoes down the hallway. When she went to bed she piled, where she could get at them handily, all the shoes there were about her house. Five minutes after she had turned off the light, she would sit up in bed and say "Hark!" Her husband, who had learned to ignore the whole situation as long ago as 1903, would either be sound asleep or pretend to be sound asleep. In either case he would not respond to her tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise, tiptoe to the door, open it slightly and heave a shoe down the hall in one direction, and its mate down the hall in the other direction. Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a couple of pair.

He came to the conclusion that he was suffocating.

But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took place during the night that the bed fell on father. By midnight we were all in bed. The layout of the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding of what later occurred. In the front room upstairs (just under father's attic bedroom) were my mother and my brother Herman, who sometimes sang in his sleep, usually "Marching Through Georgia" or "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Briggs Beall and myself were in a room adjoining this one. My brother Roy was in a room across the hall from ours. Our bull terrier, Rex, slept in the hall.

My bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which are made wide enough to sleep on comfortably only by putting up, flat with the middle section, the two sides which ordinarily hang down like the sideboards of a drop-leaf table. When these sides are up, it is perilous to roll too far toward the edge, for then the cot is likely to tip completely over, bringing the whole bed down on top of one, with a tremendous banging crash. This, in fact, is precisely what happened, about two o'clock in the morning. (It was my mother who, in recalling the scene later, first referred to it as "the night the bed fell on your father.")

Always a deep sleeper, slow to arouse (I had lied to Briggs), I was at first unconscious of what had happened when the iron cot rolled me onto the floor and toppled over on me. It left me still warmly bundled up and unhurt, for the bed rested above me like a canopy. Hence I did not wake up, only reached the edge of consciousness and went back. The racket, however, instantly awakened my mother, in the next room, who came to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, "Let's go to your poor father!" It was this shout, rather than the noise of my cot falling, that awakened Herman, in the same room with her. He thought that mother had become, for no apparent reason, hysterical. "You're all right, Mamma!" he shouted, trying to calm her. They exchanged shout for shout for perhaps ten seconds: "Let's go to your poor father!" and "You're all right!" That woke up Briggs. By this time I was conscious of what was going on, in a vague way, but did not yet realize that I was under my bed instead of on it. Briggs, awakening in the midst of loud shouts of fear and apprehension, came to the quick conclusion that he was suffocating and that we were all trying to "bring him out." With a low moan, he grasped the glass of camphor at the head of his bed and instead of sniffing it poured it over himself. The room reeked of camphor. "Ugf, ahfg," choked Briggs, like a drowning man, for he had almost succeeded in stopping his breath under the deluge of pungent spirits. He leaped out of bed and groped toward the open window, but he came up against one that was closed. With his hand, he beat out the glass, and I could hear it crash and tinkle on the alleyway below. It was at this juncture that I, in trying to get up, had the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me! Foggy with sleep, I now suspected, in my turn, that the whole uproar was being made in a frantic endeavor to extricate me from what must be an unheard-of and perilous situation. "Get me out of this!" I bawled. "Get me out!" I think I had the nightmarish belief that I was entombed in a mine. "Gugh," gasped Briggs, floundering in his camphor.

By this time my mother, still shouting, pursued by Herman, still shouting, was trying to open the door to the attic, in order to go up and get my father's body out of the wreckage. The door was stuck, however, and wouldn't yield. Her frantic pulls on it only added to the general banging and confusion. Roy and the dog were now up, the one shouting questions, the other barking.

Father, farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this time been awakened by the battering on the attic door. He decided that the house was on fire. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" he wailed in a slow, sleepy voice -- it took him many minutes to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he was caught under the bed, detected in his "I'm coming!" the mournful, resigned note of one who is preparing to meet his Maker. "He's dying!" she shouted.

Roy had to throw Rex.

"I'm all right!" Briggs yelled to reassure her. "I'm all right!" He still believed that it was his own closeness to death that was worrying mother. I found at last the light switch in my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined the others at the attic door. The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped for him -- assuming that he was the culprit in whatever was going on -- and Roy had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear father crawling out of bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic door open, with a mighty jerk, and father came down the stairs, sleepy and irritable but safe and sound. My mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex began to howl. "What in the name of God is going on here?" asked father.

The situation was finally put together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Father caught a cold from prowling around in his bare feet but there were no other bad results. "I'm glad," said mother, who always looked on the bright side of things, "that your grandfather wasn't here."

And here's the Adagio, again with Carlos Kleiber conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and again here "analyzed with the assistance of Robert Greenberg's Wordscore Guides." (In a moment we're going to hear Bruno Walter rehearsing the movement.)

BRUNO WALTER REHEARSES THE ADAGIO
OF THE BEETHOVEN FOURTH SYMPHONY

Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Bruno Walter, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Feb. 8, 1958 (mono, though the actual recording is in stereo)[Note: We hear the finished recording of the Adagio below.]

ERNEST NEWMAN TAKES A SOMEWHAT UN-SLENDERIFEROUS
VIEW OF THE FOURTH SYMPHONY(from the booklet for the original issue of Otto Klemperer's EMI Beethoven symphony cycle)

Composed 1805-6. First performed March 1807.

It became the fashion in the nineteenth century to regard the "even-number" Beethoven symphonies, from the Eroica onwards, as of lighter calibre than the Third, Fifth, Seventh and Ninth -- as works in which the indefatigable artificer took an occasional day off, as it were, from the strenuous labors of his odd-number creations. Schumann saw the Fourth as "a slim Greek maiden between two Norse giants" -- i.e., the Eroica and the Fifth. A less apposite description of the Fourth, according to our modern notion of it, could hardly be imagined; it sets us wondering what sort of etiolated performance the work used to get in the Mendelssohn epoch. One even ventures to dissent for a moment from one of the best of present-day writers on Beethoven -- Walter Riezler -- when he speaks of the symphony as being "full of untroubled happiness." This, taken by itself, may easily set up wrong connotations in the listener's mind; but if we look into the judgment a little more closely we see that Riezler gets to the root of the matter in his further remark that "its consummate harmony is founded in darkness." This is a much-needed corrective of the superficial Schumann view and what was implied in it: "happiness" in Riezler's sense is not at all the static happiness of a gracile female figure in a Greek frieze but the dynamic happiness of a giant exulting in his strength.

The Fourth is in some ways the most enigmatic of the Beethoven symphonies; it defies all our efforts to categorize it in a single epithet or two. The preamble to the first movement is already mysterious; it leads us to expect a serious, if not actually tragic denouement, instead of which some exultant "whoops" at the end of it lead into a first subject (Allegro vivace) of the most carefree kind:

EXAMPLE 1
Equally light-footed and light-hearted is the second subject:

EXAMPLE 2
But it is not long before a storm breaks out; and these swift alternations of mood continue to the end of the symphony, which oscillates all the time between gusts of fury of the type of those Beethoven had already unleashed here and there in the course of the first movement of the Eroica, and a joy in life that is alternately idyllic and titanic. Even in the exquisite Adagio, which is one of the earliest and most moving expressions of the "romantic" in orchestral music, the one atmosphere is not maintained throughout.

The symphony, in fact, abounds in unexpected strokes, not only swift alternations of mood but, within each mood, unpredictable happenings of all kinds, rapid shifts and contrarieties of rhythm, deceptive pseudo-endings followed by apparent or actual restarts, and conversely, endings coming where we had been led to expect further development. The overriding gaiety is liable to be broken in upon at any moment by a sort of tropical storm, with lightning flashing, thunder roaring, and torrential lashings of rain, the clouds however, dispersing as suddenly as they had formed.

All the deities of Olympus seem to be at play in the symphony, exhibiting alike their graces and their gusts of temper. But it is useless to try to foist any kind of programme on the work, and absurd to suppose that because it sets up images of this kind in us, therefore Beethoven's imagination must have worked along some such lines. The symphony is just a self-delighting play of the purely musical imagination.

SO NOW . . .
LET'S LISTEN TO THE PIECE!

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Op. 60

i. Adagio . . . Allegro vivace

"The opening movement presents a challenge. The first theme can hardly be called a theme at all, and yet what Beethoven makes of this melodic fragment is simply fantastic. To hold the first movement together so that it neither falls nor falters along the way is not the easiest of assignments."

— Josef Krips

London Symphony Orchestra, Josef Krips, cond. Everest, recorded c1959[Caution: The Krips-Everest Beethoven symphony cycle, originally recorded on 35mm film, sounds pretty spiffy via either original (and only original) Everest LPs or the officially licensed 1994 Omega Record Group CD reissue, but there have been countless cheapo LP and CD issues that sound mediocre or worse. Unfortunately, although I see a couple of the Omega single CDs on Amazon, at very high prices, I don't see a listing for the boxed set, and without reliable testimony I wouldn't trust any other CD issue. Caveat emptor!]

ii. Adagio

"The Fourth contains a slow movement of indescribable depth. For the conductor, this Adagio is the most difficult part of the entire work. I must confess that I worked on it for some thirty years before solving the essential rhythmic problem of this movement, which is, after all, in 3/4 time as written, and not -- as is usually assumed for the sake of convenience -- in 6/8."

Ernest Newman notes of the Allegro vivace: "It will be observed that Beethoven originally called his third movement 'Minuetto,' though it is in no sense a minuet. This is the last time he gives a symphony movement that title, though in the Eighth we get the prescription 'Tempo di Minuetto.'"

I might similarly have mentioned last night, when I slipped the whole of the Eighth Symphony into the preview, that a similar situation occurred with the near-simultaneously conceived Seventh and Eighth Symphonies.

AFTERTHOUGHT: ABOUT OUR RECORDINGS

It wasn't intentional, really and truly. In choosing four recordings to "cover" the Beethoven Fourth Symphony, I simply gravitated to conductors of whom I had fond memories in the piece. It wasn't till the post was long since posted, perhaps prodded by that recollection of Josef Krips's that he struggled with the rhythmic problem of the Adagio "for some thirty years," that it occurred to me that we have here a decided veteran group:

Yet I don't hear much in the way of signs of age here. It does occur to me, though, that it may take an awful lot of wisdom to make this piece flow as pointedly and yet as seemingly effortlessly as our team of veterans did.

For the record, Carlos Kleiber (7/3/1930 - 7/13/2004) was "only" 53 when this video recording was made in 1983, and perhaps it shows, though this may be more a matter of his "we must reconstruct the piece from scratch" approach, which for all the incidental felicities can sound, in varying degrees, well, manipulative. I kind of like this Beethoven Fourth, but I certainly don't love it. Kleiber was a brilliant talent, no doubt about it, and delivered some genuinely great performances, but the body of his work seems to me wildy and dangerously overrated -- "dangerously" in that, as with so many highly talented but idiosyncratic performers, it's the idiosyncrasies that wind up being fetishized. (Think Maria Callas.)

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Again as I'll explain tomorrow, it was a performance conducted by the legendary cellist-conductor Pablo Casals that set me thinking -- once again -- about these Beethoven symphonic introductions, but not one of the ones we're sampling here, which all date from the 1969 Marlboro Festival, when the maestro conducted all but the most grandiose of the Beethoven symphonies (Nos. 3, 5, and 9). No, the performance I was listening to is a live one from ten years earlier, when Don Pablo was a mere 82.

No, that's not a typo. When our recordings were made, he was 92. And while the performances sometimes may leave certain things to be desired, they're still pretty extraordinary for their intensity and singing quality. Both the reduced-orchestra format (about 50 players, the usual Marlboro mix of chamber-music-loving veterans and rising professionals -- the rosters are all identified in the booklets, and they're kind of jaw-dropping) and Casals's impassioned shaping allow the music to open up and breathe, with a special radiance in the wind lines (again, those parts were manned by some of the best wind players in the country.

For comparison, to remind ourselves that Beethoven could equally well get right down to symphonic work, I've included with the complete first movements below those of the two other symphonies Casals recorded, the Pastoral, No. 6, which we heard not that long ago, and No. 8. Finally, to simplify the credits, let's stipulate at the outset that all the performances here are by the Marlboro Festival Orchestra conducted by Pablo Casals, recorded in 1969 except for 8 was recorded earlier (and issued around the time of the maestro's 90th birthday), released in various forms on the sequential Columbia/CBS/Sony labels. They seem to be all obtainble, at least in downloadable form: Nos. 1 and 6, No. 2 (with the Egmont Overture and Brahms's Haydn Variations), No. 4 (with Schubert's Fifth Symphony), and Nos. 7 and 8.

LET'S PROCEED WITH THE FOUR FORMAL
INTRODUCTIONS TO BEETHOVEN SYMPHONIES

Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21:i. Adagio molto (introduction only)

Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36:i. Adagio molto (introduction only)

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Op. 60:i. Adagio (introduction only)

Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92:i. Poco sostenuto (introduction only)

THE COMPLETE FIRST MOVEMENTS
OF THE ABOVE SYMPHONIES

The purpose of this preview truly was to hear these four symphonic introductions as a group, to set us up for tomorrow's main post. But the idea isn't to tease you mercilessly. A good part of the function of these introductions, after all, is to set us up -- and here I mean set us up in multiple senses -- for the main bodies of the movements they introduce, and this purpose is defeated if we don't actually get to hear those movements.

So, at the risk of bursting the reasonable bounds of a "preview," and understanding that this is a listening option that oversteps tonight's official agenda, I feel obliged to furnish the full first movements, sticking with the Casals-Marlboro performances.

Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21:i. Adagio molto . . . Allegro con brio

Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36:i. Adagio molto . . . Allegro con brio

Symphony No. 4 in B-flat, Op. 60:i. Adagio . . . Allegro vivace

Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92:i. Poco sostenuto . . . Vivace

NOW FOR THE SYMPHONIES IN OUR GROUP
WITHOUT FORMAL INTRODUCTIONS

We start with the Pastoral, which may briefly sound as if the first phrase is a "slow introduction," but it becomes clear quickly enough that in fact it's part of the main theme.

You've probably noticed that I've slipped in not just the whole of the first movement but the darned whole of the Eighth Symphony. It was like this: I had to dub the first movement from LP anyway (I don't have the CD of Casals's Nos. 7 and 8, and while I'd saved myself the hassle by spending the two bucks to download the first movement of No. 7, I was damned if I was going to shelling out even more for the first movement of No. 8), and once I'd started the transfer going, I kind of didn't feel like stoping it. Special treat: the horns in the Trio at 2:19 of the Tempo di Menuetto. (Note, by the way, that this movement is a clear throwback on Beethoven's part, since by the Eighth Symphony he had clearly switched from the older-fashioned minuet to scherzos. Among his symphonies only No. 1 has a minuet; all the others have scherzos.)